Pharmacy, Healthcare, and Behavior (SAB III) Practice Test

Which best describes privacy vs confidentiality in patient information handling?

Privacy is the duty to protect information entrusted by a patient; confidentiality is the right to control access to personal information.

Privacy is the right to control access to personal information; confidentiality is the duty to protect information entrusted by a patient.

Privacy is the patient's right to control who can access their personal information. Confidentiality is the healthcare professional's duty to protect information that has been shared in trust and to disclose it only to authorized individuals for legitimate purposes.

In practice, you respect privacy by honoring the patient’s choices about sharing their data, and you uphold confidentiality by safeguarding those details and limiting disclosures to those who need to know for the patient’s care or for other legally permitted reasons. For example, information can be shared with other clinicians involved in the patient’s treatment under appropriate consent or permissible disclosures, but not with others who have no need to know.

This distinction isn’t the same as saying they’re interchangeable, and it isn’t correct to claim that confidentiality allows sharing without consent for care coordination.

Privacy and confidentiality are interchangeable terms.

Confidentiality means you may share patient data without consent if it's for care coordination.